On October 9th, the Internet Archive suffered a massive data breach. The data breach coincided with a separate DDoS attack effectively disabling all services provided by the Internet Archive, including their blog, NASA images, and the Wayback Machine, an archival preservation of webpages as they appeared on specific dates.
Since that day, the reason for the hack has remained a mystery. In greater Internet lore, the Internet Archive is viewed as a wholly beneficial project for users everywhere. It keeps a record of how things once appeared online and strives to preserve content lost to time or ones that have become abandoned by their respective developers, designers, producers — anything.
Data Breach: What Was Taken?
The hack exposed over 31 million registered users on the platform. Internet Archive does not ask for any ultimately personally identifiable information, but the emails, usernames, and hashed passwords of those affected users were shared with Troy Hunt, owner of Have I Been Pwned.
Have I Been Pwned is a site meant for users to plug their emails in to see if their accounts were part of any data breaches? Users can provide that same information to find out if their account was part of the Internet Archive data breach.
Internet Archive Updates Since Then
On October 17, the Wayback Machine portion of the site was reinstated in read-only mode. Meaning users could visit the site and once again see how web pages looked prior to the current day. As the site is in read-only mode, archiving any web pages is still currently disabled.
On October 21, 2024, Internet Archive announced that archive.org was back online, and shared a brief video detailing the work the team has been putting in to reinstate the site.
Sadly, the site was then taken back offline shortly thereafter. The reasoning for its seemingly immediate downtime has not been publicized by the Internet Archive, but the latest update on the status of the archive.org digital library of files is that the team is diligently working on various issues that may take the site down for “a time.”
Onward and Upward for Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is one of the largest repositories of information on the Internet. For those dabbling in retro handhelds, the Internet Archive is a commonly used resource to find information about gaming history through various magazines that have been backed up, older versions of games from previous generations, or databases to catalog entire system collections.
Hacks like these naturally cause hardship, but they do succeed in one area: nullifying the exploit. Whatever or whoever was hacked will hopefully be seen by those working on IA’s backend. At that point, they can see and work towards making the site stronger and more protected going forward.
And for all of us, that’s a good thing.
As a source of content that aims to ensure that the history of the internet is never truly lost to the sands of time, seeing the team work incredibly hard to maintain its integrity can only be a net positive for the future of the internet overall.
What did you think of this development? Are you eager to see the Internet Archive fully back up and running? Let us know in the comments below, and chat with us in our Discord!
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